Time to amend the Second Amendment

Back when I was a kid, people would routinely ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up. These days, perhaps the question should be, “What do you want to be if you grow up?”

I’m stretching the point, of course, but not by much now that deranged people seem to be opening fire on schools, churches, and concerts with increasing frequency and with military-grade firepower. And don’t let anyone tell you an AR-15 is not a military-grade weapon. Take it from a retired Marine and a Vietnam veteran: The AR-15 is the civilian semiautomatic version of the M16 I carried in Vietnam. There are only two meaningful differences: (1) The AR-15 can’t put out fully automatic fire — which we were always discouraged from doing anyway. (2) Civilians can buy 30-round magazines for their AR-15s. We had only 20-round magazines available to us in my unit in Vietnam, and we were instructed to load only 18 rounds because our M16s in 1967 had a tendency to jam — which was one of the reasons why fully automatic fire was discouraged.

Frankly, I wish I had had an AR-15 in Vietnam. I would have had more reliable firepower — and more firepower — than I had with my M16. But the fact remains that I don’t have a need for an AR-15 and high-capacity magazines now.

Nicole Hockley would certainly agree. She was the mother of one the children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, and she is now circulating an internet petition to ban high-capacity magazines. The shooter who killed her son, she points out, had ten 30-round magazines. In the time it took him to reload, 11 children escaped. If he had been limited to ten-round magazines and had to reload more often, she argues, many more children might have escaped. There are other variables, to be sure, but she does have a point. Law-abiding citizens don’t need high-capacity magazines, and prohibiting their sale and possession just might save lives.

From Columbine to Newtown and now to Parkland, Florida, the common element has been alienated, emotionally troubled kids — outsiders, in other words. Making more mental-health professionals available to schools would help, but even they can‘t readily identify those intending to make their mark through mass murder. Hence, to give the NRA its due, I’ll admit that mass shootings are, first and foremost, a mental-illness problem. We do need to revisit the laws that make involuntary commitment next to impossible. But the problem is greatly exacerbated by our easy access to guns, especially military-grade weapons designed to kill more people more quickly.

I’m especially sensitive to this issue now because Mrs. Palm and I had just met up with Danish friends in Las Vegas and were setting out on a Southwest tour on the morning of October 1, the day of Stephen Paddock’s rampage. I was embarrassed for America. And on February 14, I was in Florida visiting relatives not far from Parkland’s own Valentine’s Day massacre, and I was surprised to learn that Florida requires a three-day waiting period to buy a handgun, but not an AR-15.

As I have in the past, I’m sure to receive angry, derisive responses from readers who hold the Second Amendment to be absolute and unconditional as well as from those who believe that an armed citizenry is necessary to keep our government in check. There is no a conspiracy afoot to disarm all Americans, and Trump’s autocratic leanings notwithstanding, I can’t foresee a time when Americans will need to take up arms against their own government. Call me anti-American if you will, but I believe it’s time to amend the Second Amendment, making gun ownership a privilege and not a right.

I certainly don’t have all the answers, but here, in no particular order, are the measures I would propose:(1) Special licensing and extensive background checks for the purchase of AR-15s and similar weapons. (2) An end to private gun sales. (3) Mandatory registration of all guns. (4) A national data base to track ammunition sales. (5) Limiting gun and ammunition sales to those 21 and older. (6) A seven-day waiting period for purchasing a gun. (7) Expanding existing background checks to include juvenile offenses indicative of mental instability.

Whenever a mass shooting happens, the gun lobby tends to throw up its hands, arguing for why this or that gun-control measure would not have prevented it. A background check, for instance, wouldn’t have stopped the Las Vegas shooter or the Texas church shooter. The FBI dropped the ball in the case of the Parkland shooter. True, but we can’t change the past. We can learn from it, and we can institute sensible measures that will improve the chances of our children growing up to be whatever they want to be.